New estimates of global and regional coral reef areas

Abstract

Global and regional coral reef area statistics are of considerable value in fields ranging from global environmental change to fisheries to conservation. Although widely quoted, Smith's 1978 figure of 600000 km2 is only an approximate calculation. The World Conservation Monitoring Centre has prepared a new estimate of reef coverage by mapping emergent reef crest and very shallow reef systems. These data were rasterised, using 1 km grid squares, as a means of reducing errors arising from variation in scale, Global and regional reef coverages were calculated from the resultant grid. The total global area is estimated at 255 000 km2, considerably lower than many previous estimates. Variation in reef area estimates is, in part, a function of variation in reef definition.